are LCD displays easier on your eyes?

Now that I use an LCD at work and home, the headaches and blurred vision are gone.

The only thing to look out for though is LCDs still need fine-tuning, they can easily end up blurry or smeared if the phase settings arent tweaked (and thus, still give you a headache).

Especially if you use them at less than their design resolution.

(most people at work have 1280x1024 monitors. Most of them run their monitors at 1024x768 or even 800x600, because they think that at native res things are "too small")

As native resolutions increase, the physical dimentions of, say, a 12pt letter become smaller and smaller, and there's no way to change this without compromising on readability. That's progress for you.

Best advice is to get rid of the fluorescent light if possible (they have a flicker which can strobe with your monitor's refresh), play around with text smoothing (some people prefer Cleartype -- or the Mac equivalent -- some people don't), crank up the font size/zoom in Firefox, Word, and global preferecnes, and print out any document longer than a few pages.

Not if you have a sensible operating system, which will query the monitor's DPI (not all monitors get this right, though) and do its best to scale its letterforms so that 1 point on the screen is actually 1 point of physical length.

imagine how i feel - mine is 1920x1200!! and it's only 15" i have to magnify explorer's text to near max when i want to read anything from arms length.

(explorer on the laptop does auto scale my images, but then any "text" images look shite)

however, i find that i get zombie eyes if i set the display too bright (i look elsewhere and can't see because everything looks really dark) and both work and home LCD displays only let you set the brightness to a not very low level (that is still too bright for me), and that causes me headaches too.

LCDs are good at native or half native res say 1600x1200 and 800x600 but don't look too good at non native resolutions this is why gamers prefer CRTs as certain games will run too slowly at the high native resolutions of panels, not to mention better colour gamut and a lack of ghosting caused by high response rate on alot of LCDs, recently there has been debate about an upadate latency on LCDs which may mean the display is lagging behind the video frame.

Another issue I see time and time again is 5:4 monitors at 4:3 resolutions or vice versa.

Most 17 inch LCD panels are native at 1280x1024 which is a 5:4 resolution and most/all CRTs are 4:3 resolution so a 19" CRT at a similiar res would be at 1280x960, some panels are 4:3 though, usually the ones at 1600x1200 like the Dell 2001FP.

Then there are widescreen displays, which are usually 16:10 or 1680 X 1050 for a 20" panel like the 2005FPW.

If you dont set this correctly your circles will be ovals and your squares.

As regards stuff being to small on high res panels you can change DPI and use large icons and font size, also remember to use cleartype to make text look really sharp.

There is only so you can do with the GDI+ implementation on Windows XP look for Vista to allow true desktop scaling hopefully, allowing you to run native resolution but scale exactly how you'd like to keep things sharp.

In the meantime though, raise your CRT's refresh rate to something, anything above 60hz.